Like when you read up on history..hundreds of years would pass without that much advancement but now in the last 100-150 years things changed so much.
Why?
In: Technology
In the 19th century you had three forces come together for the first time in a big way.
One of them was the development of the modern scientific enterprise — you’ve got lots of brains applying themselves to learning more about the world in a very systematic way. It stops being something that rich people do for fun, or something that is only open to absolute geniuses, and starts being a career that lots of people can get into.
Another is industrialization, where suddenly there was a huge amount of capital and resources being applied to creating new markets, products, labor saving devices, and so on. In some countries (notably Germany) this became very linked to the work of the scientists and universities in a synergistic way: the industries would fund the science, the science would aid the industry.
Another is the rise of the modern state, which began applying larger and larger resources to scientific enterprises that had a technological component. This became especially important in the 20th century, around the areas of military and war, but there were many spin-offs from this that became broadly used. So someone else brought up the transistor — this was an Army-funded research project that was meant to make more compact amplifiers for radios. But it ended up having many other applications and helped launch Silicon Valley.
Once you pair these three forces up, and people start figuring out you can put them all together, they collectively hoovered up a lot of “low hanging fruit” — things that were relatively easily discoverable and producible, and things that could be incrementally advanced (like packing more transistors into chips). Occasionally a brand new idea came along, but often the “progress” was in exploiting existing ideas or getting them adopted at a large-scale in a way that would enable further developments (so the real genius of someone like Edison was not so much that he invented the light bulb, which was an improvement on ideas already out there, but he convinced people to sign up for an electric grid, which opened up many other possibilities once it was in place).
Prior to the 19th century you really just don’t have these things linked up very efficiently. States funded wars but not industry or science; science was largely done by people not especially interested in practical implications (and their science was too basic to be of much use, most of the time); commercial activity was dominated by guilds and craftsmen who had a lot of ingenuity but were not exceedingly interesting in innovation because it would threaten their monopolies. It took a very long time for a lot of these things to change; the real prerequisites for all of this were created during the Early Modern Period in Western Europe, when revolutions in politics, science, and economics all took place at about the same time, in the context of war, exploration, and religious strife. It’s a fascinating period of history and set the stage for what would come next.
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